“I know it’s fast. Iknowhow fucking fast this is happening. I don’t care.” He traces the backs of his fingers along my cheekbone. His expression is fierce, and intense. “Amelie.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
I’m a little shocked, of course I am. It’s Sunday night. We met exactlytwo days ago. Which seems impossible. We’ve spent the past whatever-number-of-hours getting increasingly and outrageously down and dirty, in ways I didn’t even know was possible. “Dallas?—”
“Don’t say anything. I don’t expect you to say it back. But I do: I fuckingloveyou.” It’s too much, of course, and too fast. I don’t how to reply to him. “Do you want to know something?”
“What?”
“I’ve always had a head for numbers. So much of a head for numbers that I didn’t really have room for anything else inthere. My parents thought I lacked emotion as a child. They sent me to specialists and therapists to see if I was ‘on the spectrum.’ It turned out I wasn’t. The therapists told my parents it was just a case of me being guarded because—and this was putting it kindly—there was a lot of emotion going on around me. I was living in a world where everyone else’s emotions, and one person’s in particular, took up all the bandwidth I could handle. Numbers weren’t emotional. They were safe and predictable and easy to read. They weren’t manipulative. They gave me a kind of peace to retreat into, which sounds strange now.”
I run my fingers along his jaw, which is rough with stubble. “It doesn’t sound strange at all.”
“I’m telling you this because I want you to know how different this is for me than anything that’s ever happened to me before. There’s beauty in the certainty of numbers, and there’s beauty in the certainty of an equation’s solution, because they’re no questioning it. It’s either right or it’s wrong.” He’s staring deep into my eyes. “You, Amelie, are like a complicated algorithm’s perfect solution.”
This makes me smile. “I am? How?”
“I’m sure of you. Until now, everyone—every person I met—was wrong. As clear as day, in black and white: wrong. The equation didn’t add up. But with you, it does. I know it’s hard to believe and I know love isn’t math, but for me it’s just as easy to see. When I saw you, I could see it. And there was no need to question it. Because I knew for a fact that the equation added up.”
A light laugh escapes me. I get what he’s explaining to me.But it’s a lot to take in. “I can barely add two and two together,” I confess.
He’s so quietly spellbound. And willing to be as patient as he needs to be. “How about I do the math and you paint the pictures.”
“Deal.”
But he’s still deeply, staunchly persistent. “And when we get to New York, I want you to stay with me.”
I watch his face, so familiar to me now, and so … anguished. Because he doesn’t know if I’ll say yes to him. And neither do I. “I’m not sure?—”
“You’re doing it again.” He’s gentle about it though. “I knew you would.”
“Doing what?”
“Saying no when you should be saying yes.”
Damn it. Why does everyone accuse me of this all the time? It annoys me enough to lash out at him just to prove him wrong. Icanbe spontaneous and free-wheeling, whenever I want to be, thank you very much. “Fine. I’ll stay with you. For a while.” But then it occurs to me that he might be using reverse psychology.
And he’s gazing at me with those damn blue-green eyes like maybe he actuallydoeslove me—as much as you can love a person you’ve known for two days. “Good.”
“Happy now?”
He grins at me, that killer smile that melts something in me I’m not sure I can handle in liquid form. “As a matter of fact, Iamhappy now. Happier than you could ever know.”
I roll my eyes. “Well, I’m gladsomeone is.”
This makes him laugh and—damn him—Ilovehis laugh. It’s deep and sexy and it makes me want to do that thing again where I suck on him and drive him crazy with lust until he’s—“You’re happy too, admit it. And you’re going to be a whole lot happier when I show you New York.”
It reminds me of our plans to see more of the city. “I didn’t really get to show you much of New Orleans.”
“Yeah, we never quite got to the river cruise. You’ve been too busy jumping my bones 24/7.”
I push at him playfully. “You’vebeen jumpingmybones.”
“And I’m about to jump your bones again, baby girl.” His fingers roveveryintimately as he kisses me again. Maybe more than anything else—although it’s hard to rate these things—Ilovethis hotly mischievous side to him, the one that makes me wonder if he’s ever given it to anyone else in the world. If his math equation confession is anything to go by, I get this deeply elated feeling that he hasn’t. That it’s purely for me. “Boo?”
“Yeah?”
